Within the United States, trucks carry the majority of freight, and a large portion of the trucking industry concentrates on less than truckload (LTL) shipments. This is understandable, since many shipments are not large enough to fill a truck, but are too large to economically justify shipment by a parcel carrier such as UPS. As a result, many trucks (and, by extension, other freight transport modalities such as containers, trains, barges, ships and airplanes) carry less than a full load. Since the cost of operating a truck is largely unaffected by the size of its load, this unused capacity represents a substantial economic inefficiency. Without loss of generality, the following argument can be extended to other forms of freight transportation, including trains, barges, airplanes, containers, and ships.
Another industry that has experienced similar problems is the airline industry, particularly since it was deregulated a quarter of a century ago. Upon deregulation, existing airlines faced competition from many new low-cost entrants. During the decade that followed, several incumbent airlines failed (Eastern, PanAm, National). Others, such as American, United, and Delta, gained market share. These incumbents survived and prospered largely by adopting three technologies: hub-and-spoke topologies, yield management, and frequent flier programs.
Hub-and-spoke networks evolved from earlier point-to-point service, channeling passengers from their point of origin to one of several hubs, from which other flights depart. This approach, by separating access to the network of flights from travel within it, allows airlines to offer more departures between an origin and destination, while increasing capacity utilization. The downside is that service now includes a smaller proportion of direct flights, which imposes a convenience cost on the consumer, or an inconvenience due to time constraints.
Another innovation developed by airlines was that of yield management, or the use of fare structure to maximize capacity utilization and revenue per flight. Yield management exploits the fact that airline passengers generally fall into two categories, tourists and business travelers. Tourists are typically price sensitive, but are willing to plan their trips in advance and spend weekends away from home. Business travelers, in contrast, tend to be more willing to pay more to fly, but need to schedule their flights on shorter notice and are less willing to spend their weekends on the road. These different attributes have encouraged airlines to adopt fare policies that differentiate between these two groups. As a result, two otherwise identical tickets on the same flight may have vastly different fares, depending on the time and conditions of purchase. Airlines use fares to maximize yield because they cannot directly control the demand for seats, and can only use fares as an indirect mechanism to do so.
Finally, airlines developed frequent flyer programs to exploit an attribute of how business-related airline tickets are purchased and to encourage customer loyalty. One well-understood effect of frequent flier programs is that they encourage brand loyalty, and therefore reduce price competition between airlines. What drives these programs, however, is the separation of the functions of selecting and paying for a flight for business. In particular, the typical business traveler chooses the carrier, but the employer pays for the ticket. Frequent flier programs thus work by rewarding the traveler directly for how he or she spends the employer's money. Airlines are not alone in using this market structure—other examples include health insurers (who pay for medical services specified and performed by providers) and McDonald's (which markets toward children, even though parents pay).
While the freight transportation and airline industries share many attributes (network structure, different priorities for services, and separation of purchase of and payment for services), the freight industry has been slow to adopt many airline innovations. In trucking, which accounts for the majority of freight hauled in the United States, the industry is segmented into truckload and less than truckload (LTL) hauling. Truckload firms operate by running trucks that are usually dedicated to a single customer on a point-to-point basis. Less than truckload firms (which represent a majority of the trucking industry) move loads between points, but put multiple loads on the same truck. By U.S. Department of Transportation definition, the term “truckload” includes motor carriers operating with loads that weigh either more than 10,000 lbs., or loads that require exclusive use of the truck. This excludes parcel carriers such as UPS or Federal Express, and the Postal Service. Other groups classify LTL to include service for loads that weigh between 250-12,000 lbs. In this respect, an LTL firm operates much like an airline, hauling disparate loads while trying to maximize revenue per truck.
Despite the similarities, the LTL trucking industry has failed to keep pace with the airline industry in terms of capacity utilization policies. One area in which the LTL carriers have emulated airlines is the adoption of hub-and-spoke topologies, known in the industry as freight consolidation. Freight consolidation operates by having the LTL carrier pick up the load from the shipper and take it to a nearby warehouse owned by the carrier. The load then waits until enough cargo has accumulated from other orders to justify sending a full truck to another warehouse near the destination. From that point, a third truck takes the load from the warehouse to the final destination. Consolidation thus allows an LTL carrier to reduce the number of miles traveled by partially full trucks. The disadvantage to this approach, however, is that a load to be consolidated must wait until enough goods share a common destination to justify sending a full truck.
Another area in which the freight industry lags behind its air transport counterparts is in yield management. The reason why LTL consolidators must rely on flexible shipping schedules is because they have no direct influence on demand. This is because carriers generally have no direct control over the orders they ship—customers do. As a result, there is no direct link between the carrier cost and level of service, on the one hand, and the order flow, on the other.
Several attempts have been made to more closely match order flow with transportation capacity utilization. One approach, demand synchronization, calls for customers to place their orders with a manufacturer at only a specified time, in order to allow the manufacturer to send the orders out in a more economically efficient batch. A more extreme approach, vendor-managed inventory (VMI), takes the customer out of the ordering process in toto. Under VMI, the manufacturer reviews the customer's inventory, arranges for orders, and sends the goods to the customer with only the customer's tacit approval. Under VMI, the responsibilities of ordering and fulfillment are both assumed by the manufacturer, who minimizes logistics costs, subject to agreed-upon standards for inventory levels and quality of service.
VMI offers many advantages to its users. Both parties gain by reduced data entry errors, faster processing, and better service for customers. Combining responsibilities for ordering and order fulfillment helps make logistics costs an explicit part of the cost calculation. Transportation assets have greater capacity utilization, and loading dock congestion, and warehouse congestion are alleviated.
VMI also offers benefits that accrue solely to the customer. The customer experiences a reduction in order processing time, which produces several beneficial effects. Fill rates from the manufacturer are improved. The level of service increases, since the system can be more responsive to changes in demand. Inventory levels decrease. Additionally, planning and ordering costs are passed back to the supplier, and are therefore eliminated. Finally, since the manufacturer bears responsibility for fulfillment, it is more focused than ever on customer satisfaction.
The supplier also gains from VMI. It gains visibility with customers. Access to customer inventory data makes it easier to forecast demand. Customer ordering errors (and consequent returns) are reduced. Finally, since the manufacturer has control of both orders and freight costs, an incentive exists to coordinate them to reduce total costs.
VMI carries with it several disadvantages, however. First, the customer cedes control of a critical process—purchasing—to a supplier. Such a close relationship requires a degree of trust that is rare in the business world. Second, VMI is based around the one to one relationship between supplier and customer. As a result, while VMI relationships can be economically beneficial, they typically require a large amount of scale to justify, given the fixed costs associated with implementing the VMI solution, and the level of traffic required to fill trucks on a regular basis.
Thus, while VMI may seem to cure all logistical ills, it is difficult to implement universally. As a result, many customer relationships will continue to be based on the traditional model of the customer ordering goods and the supplier paying for freight. In this case, the freight industry has nothing comparable to the third airline achievement—the incentives provided by frequent flier programs. Frequent flier programs work because they target a party, the flier (typically a business flier), who has purchasing authority, but does not have to pay for what is bought. Similarly, in many industries, the customer, when buying a product with a delivered price, indirectly purchases freight services from a carrier, but the manufacturer pays for it. While airlines have been able to address this market characteristic, the closest that the freight industry has come in approaching this mechanism is to use VMI to consolidate these functions.
So, although the LTL industry must deal with a set of problems similar to that faced by the airline industry—network topology, unpredictable demand, and a lack of incentives to coordinate behavior between seller, customer and carrier, it has failed to evolve an effective response. This failure is all the more telling since the freight industry, unlike that for passengers, can directly control cargo; whereas airlines cannot force people, no matter how delightful the destination, onto airplanes.
Previous efforts to optimize logistics have been deductive in nature, accepting the state of the world as a given and attempting to drive towards a more efficient outcome. The presently described technology takes an inductive approach: given that a logistically ideal world is to be achieved, what is the best way to achieve it? As a result, the presently described technology combines variants of the airline innovations of hub-and-spoke topology, order flow control, and trade incentives to optimize the use of logistics assets in a new and economically useful way.